Blog: The Advisor

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has attracted a great deal of attention from service providers, enterprises, and industry associations.

Our partner Alert Logic provides managed security and compliance solutions for over 3,000 customers across the globe. As part their cybersecurity research practice they review threats and attacks against their vast customer base looking for insight to share in their annual Cloud Security Report.

It’s like the Wild West out there for companies trying to protect their data and systems from cyber criminals. Data breaches, with multi-million dollar consequences are happening every day. Cyber criminals are becoming savvier, and their costs are going down. C-Levels are being held accountable for damaging and costly hacks and executives are scrambling to recruit the best security talent to protect their business.

  What started in 2006 with Amazon Web Services has mushroomed into a multibillion-dollar industry, and its transformation has been profound.

  If you are a company that has joined the DevOps movement to integrate code and infrastructure deployment, it's likely you (or someone in your organization) have had some concerns about information security. In an effort to release products faster or reduce time to market, information security gaps can become a problem for any company. Security monitoring tools haven’t been able to keep up with the fast-paced changes being made by DevOps when releasing new features or products.

Every few years the IT industry witnesses a major technology shift.

Over 80% of cyberattacks use a multi-vector approach to disable a network or servers.

In an effort to sync up with the gradual slowing of the earth’s rotation we experienced what is being referred to as a “leap second” yesterday at midnight Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Apparently this leap second could’ve been bad news for computer systems around the globe. The last leap second, which took place in 2012, brought down Gizmodo, Reddit, Yelp, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Gawker, and StumbleUpon, among other sites and apps. Although Amazon did experience an outage yesterday, it appears that it was unrelated, and most US companies were more prepared for the extra second this time around.

If you are running a company that has anything to do with security, big data, or IoT, you are looking pretty attractive to larger suitors right about now. This year has been the jam packed with merger and acquisition activity; we’ve had the biggest run of M&A activity since the dotcom bubble. Companies in every industry are looking at digital transformation as the way forward into the global economy, and the companies that sell solutions to address this transformation are hot items.

Since the 70’s many US and foreign multinational companies have taken advantage of the business-friendly tax laws that Luxembourg has to offer.

Venom, announced recently by security intelligence firm CrowdStrike, is a vulnerability affecting the floppy drive emulation code used by many virtualization platforms. It looks like Venom will not be as big as Heartbleed, the vulnerability discovered last year that allowed hackers to grab data from the memory of servers running affected versions of the open-source OpenSSL encryption software. However, VENOM is of particular interest to cloud-users everywhere as it is one of a very few vulnerabilities at the hypervisor that compromises the security through isolation promise of virtualization-based cloud infrastructure.

Container madness is still in full force with more big name vendors like AWS, Google, Red Hat, IBM, Microsoft and VMware jumping on the container bandwagon that Docker got rolling. The madness is also fueled by container technologies driving changes in the conversation around cloud computing.